A laboratory trial evaluated four phytoseiid species for their potential as biological control agents of spruce spider mite, Oligonychus ununguis (Jacobi) (Acari: Tetranychidae). An augmentative biological control approach, using the predatory mites Neoseiulus fallacis Garman and Galendromus occidentalis Nesbitt (Acari: Phytoseiidae), was evaluated for reducing pest mite densities and injury, a...

Spiders perform many essential ecological services, yet humans often experience negative emotions toward spiders. These emotions can lead to the avoidance of beneficial events. These emotions may affect beliefs about what should or should not be included in a science curriculum. This study investigated how activities with living spiders affected preservice middle school science teachers' emotio...

This paper is about spider diagrams, an extension of Euler diagrams that includes syntax to make assertions about set cardinalities. Like many diagrammatic logics, spider diagrams are a monadic and first-order, so they are inexpressive. The limitation to first-order precludes the formalisation of many fundamental concepts such as the cardinality of a set being even. To this end, second-order sp...

We present an approach for interactively generating pen-and-ink hatching renderings based on hand-drawn examples. We aim to overcome the regular and synthetic appearance of the results of existing methods by incorporating human virtuosity and illustration skills in the computer generation of such imagery. To achieve this goal, we propose to integrate an automatic style transfer with user intera...

Both parental care and hatching plasticity can improve embryo survival. Research has found that parents can alter hatching time owing to a direct effect of care on embryogenesis or via forms of care that cue the hatching process. Because parental care alters conditions critical for offspring development, hatching plasticity could allow embryos to exploit variation in parental behaviour. However...

Prey assessing risk may miss cues and fail to defend themselves, or respond unnecessarily to false alarms. Error rates can be ameliorated with more information, but sampling predator cues entails risk. Red-eyed treefrogs have arboreal eggs and aquatic tadpoles. The embryos use vibrations in snake attacks to cue behaviorally mediated premature hatching, and escape, but vibrations from benign sou...

Acute corticosterone secretion helps individuals survive perturbation, particularly when faced with unpredictable conditions. However, elevated corticosterone is often incompatible with reproduction. Male Yellow Warblers (Dendroica petechia) breeding at high latitude avoid this conflict by exhibiting a reduced adrenocortical response while provisioning nestlings. To determine if this reduction ...

Spider veins (also known as spider hemangiomas) unlike varicose veins (dilated pre-existing veins) are acquired lesions caused by venous hypertension leading to proliferation of blood vessels in the skin and subcutaneous tissues due to the release of endothelial growth factors causing vascular neogenesis. More than 60% of the patients with spider veins of the legs have significant symptoms incl...

The role of actin filaments and contractions in hatching was determined in mouse blastocysts whose actin filament bundling abilities had been suppressed by H-89, an inhibitor of protein kinase A. The hatching rate of blastocysts developed from morulae in a medium containing H-89 at a concentration of 4.0 microM was 17.2%, which was significantly lower than the 76.7% of the control blastocysts d...

date palm spider mite is one of the major pests of date palm in khuzestan.this pest damages fruits in orchards. in the present study responses of 30 native date palm cultivars of khuzestan were evaluated by assessment of pest infestation severity and fruit damage characteristics. based on the responses, cultivars were clustered into four groups as very highly infested cultivars including liloei...